Film reviews round-up: The Accountant, A Streetcat Named Bob, and Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny

A Ben Affleck-starring thriller, an inspiring tale of man and cat, plus a look at the incredible career of Austin’s favourite filmmaker

Big-eyed moggy Bob gives James (Luke Treadaway) a reason to get his life back on track

The Accountant (15)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Gavin O’Connor, 128 mins, starring: Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, JK Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Tambor, John Lithgow

“He’s an accountant!” one character exclaims in disbelief after seeing Chris Wolff (Ben Affleck) in action in this far-fetched thriller. Wolff doesn’t just help clients fill in their tax returns or work out if their employees have been cooking the books.

He’s also an expert marksman who can hit a pumpkin from a mile away and he has martial arts skills that put those of Bruce Lee to shame. He’s autistic but high functioning. In his private life, he suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder syndrome and gets very upset if his knives and forks are out of place.

He works for some of the most dangerous people on the planet but survives because he’ll break the necks of anyone who crosses him. It helps, too, that he is so good with figures. He can lose himself in numbers. It is just hard for him to understand the way that people behave and speak.

In the early scenes, showing Wolff as a troubled kid, prone to extreme tantrums, the film seems to be shaping up as a melodrama, looking at the impact his behaviour has on his family. A few moments later, though, the film switches tone entirely, moving into thriller mode.

Affleck plays Wolff in a way that’s not that far removed from his portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman. True, he’s not a millionaire and he doesn’t have a butler or a Batmobile but his personality is split along similar lines to that of Gotham’s most famous inhabitant. One moment, he will be in his suit and spectacles, looking thoroughly uptight, and the next he will be in kick-ass mode. He’s an ambiguous figure whose motivations are very hard to work out. He keeps very bad company and yet has his own code of honour and decency.

When the film is threatening to become a little too portentous, Affleck manages to lighten affairs with some deadpan humour. Wolff has a sometimes comic inability to express emotion. At the most violent moments, he remains even tempered. He will make bland small talk just after throttling an enemy. He speaks his lines in an affectless way, reciting an old nursery rhyme to keep himself calm. He has learned how to keep his childhood tantrums at bay.

Only in private does Wolff express the anger and frustration he keeps so well bottled up. In one jarring and disturbing scene, we see him self-harming, beating his own shins with a pole.

Bill Dubuque’s screenplay is wildly over-determined and pulls in multiple different directions at once. The supporting characters are drawn in sketchy fashion. JK Simmons plays a seemingly very hardboiled and ruthless senior Treasury department official in pursuit of “the accountant”. Cynthia Addai-Robinson is cast as the department analyst he blackmails into finding out his identity. Both seem as if they will play a major part in the story but are then largely forgotten about until the final reel.

Wolff’s family members are likewise under-developed. He has a military martinet father (Robert C Treveiler) who, at least initially, appears to be treating him very cruelly indeed, with no sympathy or understanding for his condition. We’re told that as a kid, Wolff lived in 34 homes in 17 years. The father, though, is the one who teaches him to fight.

There are confusing references to Wolff’s time in the army and to a stint her served in prison. His relationship with his brother – his only friend when he was a kid – is skated over. His burgeoning romance with a fellow accountant (Anna Kendrick) runs into a dead end too. They share a love of numbers and seemingly a love of art. (He keeps an original Jackson Pollock on his trailer ceiling.)

She comes closer than anyone else to penetrating his reserve but even then struggles with his reclusive personality. Many of the revelations late on in the film verge on the absurd. There is also a coda which seems to belong in a different movie in which we’re taken around an expensive care home for high achieving autistic kids.

Settings here range from the modernist offices and labs of the robotics company run by the vaguely sinister Lamar Black (John Lithgow) to the idyllic rural retreat where the accountant spends some of his time hiding out. Certain scenes work well. In one memorable sequence, we see Wolff at his number crunching best, working his way through 15 years of accounts in a matter of hours and keeping a makeshift ledger on office walls and windows.

The fuzzy footage of him in assassination mode, disposing of a small army of mobster heavies in a matter of seconds, is also impressively choreographed. This, though, is a film that has little idea of its identity. The filmmakers are uncertain whether they’re making a Good Will Hunting-style drama about a kid with a genius for maths, a Bourne Identity-style thriller or an uplifting drama about coping with autism. The result is a film that, in spite of its title, simply doesn’t add up properly.

A Street Cat Named Bob (12A)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Roger Spottiswoode, 103 mins, starring: Luke Treadaway, Ruta Gedmintas, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head, Beth Goddard

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that images of cats, placed on the internet or on film or TV screens, induce an extraordinary, drooling enthusiasm from a large part of the population. The Brits are a nation of cat lovers. For this reason alone, A Street Cat Named Bob, looks bound to be a substantial hit.

It is crammed full of close-ups of its feline protagonist Bob. (Some sharp-eyed viewers have claimed Bob is played by a number of different cats. If this is the case, they are all equally photogenic.) Certain scenes are even shot from Bob’s point of view. We get a ground-eye view as he goes after a mouse and we experience his terror when he is being chased by a pitbull in slow motion.

The film, based on a true story, deals with some dark subject matter – homelessness, heroin addiction, hunger, street violence, the agonies of drug withdrawal. Whenever matters become too grim, director Roger Spottiswoode (best known previously for Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies) will throw in an image of Bob looking wistful in a way that Pierce Brosnan never managed.

You’ll need a heart of stone (or an extreme allergy to cats) not to be moved by the combination here of Loach-like realism, Dickensian sentimentality (laid on with a trowel) and all those scenes of the big-eyed tabby meowing in the rain or making eyes at the conductor on the number 38 bus.

It’s a toss up as to who looks the more bedraggled, recovering heroin addict James (Luke Treadaway) or the moggy who breaks into the council flat that his drug support worker Val (Joanne Froggatt) has somehow secured for him. He’s a busker who’s on methadone. Val believes that James has it in him to turn his life around. His middle-class dad (Anthony Head) has re-married and this wife wants nothing to do with James. When Bob crashes into his life, James has an animal that he feels even more sorry for than he does for himself.

With Bob on his shoulders, James soon becomes a star seller of the Big Issue. Everyone wants their picture taken with his cat. He is used to being ignored but, as a journalist from the Islington Tribune tells him, he has become a “human interest” story.

Spottiswoode and his screenwriters somehow fashion a feature length movie out of the merest a wisp of a story. We know that there will have to be some reversals and hardship along the way. In the early scenes, James will be 9p short of the change he needs to buy a burger. Later on, when money again is tight, he’ll make extreme sacrifices to ensure that Bob is kept in Whiskas and tuna.

Some street violence is thrown into the mix. James’ friend Baz (very vividly played by Darren Evans in best hyper-charged Artful Dodger fashion) presents a picture of the hell into which James might descend if he goes back on drugs or loses his beloved cat. There’s a love story here too, engagingly told and featuring James and his beautiful New Age neighbour, Belle (Ruta Gedmintas), who knows everything about cats even if her skin comes out in blotches the moment she goes near them.

No opportunity for tweaking on our heartstrings is knowingly ignored. This is shamelessly manipulative filmmaking but it is also sometimes effective. If you’re partial to cats and don’t mind a bit of saccharine with your social realism, it’s the kind of movie to leave you purring in approval. If not, you'll probably come out in hives.

Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Louis Black, Karen Bernstein, 90 mins, featuring: Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Matthew McConaughey, Julie Delpy

Of the many US indie directors who emerged in the early 1990s, Richard Linklater has had the most varied and intriguing careers. Basing himself in Austin, Texas, far from Hollywood, he has managed to continue working on his own terms, whatever reversals he has experienced along the way. His filmography includes some studio movies (the most successful being School Of Rock, for which he was hired by producer Scott Rudin.)

Most of the time, though, his work has had a determinedly personal feel. There has been the triumph of Boyhood, made over a period of a dozen years and his trilogy of low budget, very intimate romantic dramas (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) with Ethan Hawke and Delpy. He has experimented with animation and has made his share of period movies.

This documentary is in keeping with its subject. It is low key, amiable and informative. Co-directed by fellow Austin resident Louis Black, co-founder of the Austin Chronicle and someone who has known Linklater from the very start of his career, it has an authoritative tone. The filmmakers interview all the relevant figures from Linklater himself to family members, colleagues like Hawke and Jack Black, distributors and admirers (Kent Jones among them).

Linklater himself emerges as a paradoxical figure. On the one hand, he is as laidback as you’d expect the director of Slacker to be. On the other, he is clearly fiercely competitive and very driven. At one stage, he had the dream of becoming a baseball player (a period of his life dealt with in his semi-autobiographical Everybody Wants Some!!!).

One part jock and one part nerd, he was also steeping himself in Dostoevsky novels and filling notebooks with ideas for making himself the next great American writer. Like the similarly freewheeling and irreverent Robert Altman (whose natural successor he appears to be), he works in a very collaboratIve fashion, soliciting ideas from everyone, but he also ensures that his is the name on the credits.